


yet each man kills the thing he loves

by marrowbones



Category: The Expanse (TV)
Genre: F/M, Minor Character Death, Unrequited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2020-12-31 20:29:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21151754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marrowbones/pseuds/marrowbones
Summary: Sadavir has known Chrisjen for a long time.





	yet each man kills the thing he loves

_You taught me, you drilled it into my head, that Earth must come first. And now you’ve thrown me to the wolves for fulfilling my sacred oath while you grovel at the foot of Mars and Jules-Pierre Mao, and that is the real betrayal here. _

-

There is a moment, long before the Eros hearings—before he watches the Martian defense minister die on the floor of his office after an evening at the opera, before he sends Chrisjen off to an ignoble end in the dark of space—when the two of them are at a function following the close of the General Assembly. Jodie is in Seattle after their latest fight, ostensibly for her father’s birthday. Arjun is at home recuperating from throat surgery, and so Chrisjen has had her hand nestled comfortably in the crook of his arm for much of the evening. The two of them take turns identifying fellow diplomats and emissaries and the various scandals attached to a host of names from the face books they’d had to study before the event.

The pomp and state of the Assembly had paid a good deal of lip service to the recent anniversary of the ceasefire, but tensions have flared recently to mark the occasion; the Martian presence in New York is being deluged with—well, protestors would be the kind word for what they are, when what they are involves death threats and Molotov cocktails that don’t make it farther than the perimeter fence of the MCR compound. The meaning is clear enough.

It is when he is returning to her side with refreshed glasses of sparkling wine that he joins a small cluster of people now gathered around Michael Souther and Augusto Nguyen, who are arguing with strained geniality about the hostage situation at the U.N. embassy on Mars. Nguyen came up under the old guard, the scars from his experience in the Vesta blockade still fresh, and his resentment is palpable. He is loudly declaiming the Martian insurgents against Souther’s belligerent defense of the Martian situation that gave rise to the instability in the first place.

Chrisjen watches everything with an air of amused detachment that he knows too well hides a hawkish attention.

“_You’re_ conspicuously quiet,” Souther finally snaps at her. “I’m beginning to think I should be worried.”

“I wouldn’t be,” she says airily. “As far as I’m concerned, the captors are a fringe group gone off the deep end, and when they’re subdued, the Martians can disavow them, Earth can forgive them as a radical faction, and we all get on with our lives. Which, if I’m not mistaken—” she pauses and looks down at her hand terminal clutched discreetly beneath her champagne flute, “should be in about three minutes.”

There is a ripple of shocked silence. Souther looks queasy. Nguyen looks smug. Soon enough, hand terminals start to chime around the room, identifying members of the security council. His own goes off quietly in his pocket, but he has an idea of what it will say: _U.N. Embassy hostages secure and en route to extraction point. Insurgents contained._

Chrisjen raises her chin just a fraction so the light catches in the rubies of her earrings the same as in her eyes, and in the moment before she smiles, he anticipates it: that slow, sly curve of her painted lips.

Something sharp and hot and urgent tugs beneath his ribs, tighter when her eyes fall on him, wicked with her victory and yet warm enough to let him share in it.

—_that_, looking back, is when he knew.

-

Very rarely, on nights when they have spent too many hours poring over appropriations bills or security briefings, when he is down to shirtsleeves and she has kicked off her shoes, she goes so far as to unbind her hair from its severe updo. The first time it happened, his breath had caught in his throat with how illicit he felt at the sight—her hair, like the earrings and necklaces and jewel-toned fabrics, so much a part of her armor that he had simply equated it with the woman herself, a state of being.

There is a weary ritual to her fingers carefully unpinning coils of ink-dark hair to let them tumble down over her shoulders that belies a disconcerting softness to a woman he knows to be hard as flint. He aches to run his hands over the thick sheaf of it, wonders if it would be as fine as the dense silk spill of her sari or as unyielding as the rest of her. Wonders which, exactly, he would prefer.

He watches her weave a loose braid as she continues to study the report arrayed across his desk, and doesn’t notice she has finished until she is saying his name with an odd look on her face.

“I think we’ve had enough for one night,” she says, wry, like they’ve overindulged instead of pushed through to meet a looming deadline that will likely only engender more delays.

He huffs a laugh and scrubs a hand over his face to pretend that the heaviness of his eyelids is from simple exhaustion.

He dreams that night of unpinning her hair, his palms careful on her shoulders and the scent of her woody-sweet perfume in the air, or: he dreams of running his fingers through clear, cold water. Of planting his feet steady and sure in the gravity of his planet. Of breathing deep the smell of fresh earth and knowing home.

-

Charanpal Avasarala is a serious, gentle man who inherited his father’s thoughtfulness, his mother’s intellect, and both his parents’ charm. Chrisjen would see him inherit a family predilection for politics, and so he obeys his mother’s wishes and enlists. She confesses later, eyes twinkling, that she’d used his own military service as a bit of leverage—_you see? Sadavir started in the Navy and look at him now, a humble pencil-pusher for the U.N. _

They are in transition between secretaries-general, he and Chrisjen both riding Esteban Sorento-Gillis’s coattails all the way to the top. If he thinks about it for too long, his throat still gets tight and his heart starts to beat too fast; he still can’t quite believe his gamble paid off.

"A humble pencil-pusher soon to be one step removed from running the whole goddamn planet," he teases.

"That’s what he said, too," she replies, smug. "Of course, he also said that his own dear mother never served, and she will shortly be _two_ steps removed from running the whole goddamn planet."

He cocks his head and smiles at her, helplessly fond. "So that’s what a service record gets you."

They are in the midst of a legislative session when violence breaks out on Callisto. He is there when the knock comes at her office door, and he answers it to find Arjun waiting, his entire shattered heart in his eyes. She follows him to the door, smiling, and then grabs his wrist for balance when the yet-unspoken truth settles on her and she stumbles with its weight. He will remember that she stumbles. She is as affected by gravity and grief as anyone else.

He sits behind her at the funeral. She is terribly lovely as she holds herself together with all the frigid dignity she can muster, which still doesn’t quite mask the impotent, self-recriminating rage simmering beneath the surface. And of course she goes back to work too soon, sets herself against the proxy war with a vengeance, staying late at the UN compound and haunting the halls in the small hours until she is gray with the strain. When he confronts her in the hallway between her office and the situation room and tells her firmly to go home and get some sleep, she jerks away from the hand he puts on her arm for emphasis and seems immediately to regret it; her dark eyes are huge and lost until he folds her into his arms in wordless apology.

It is the only time she ever lets him hold her, that interminable hallway in the 3 a.m. quiet, tears threatening but never quite falling as he smooths a thumb over the patterns picked in gold on her shoulder.

-

The protomolecule comes quietly, at first. A social call to an old friend. An anonymous file uploaded to his hand terminal.

His first thought is of how to use it. The report claims it has some kind of primitive intelligence, could feasibly be trained like a creeping vine to grow toward a desired aim.

His second thought is that Chrisjen wouldn’t like it. Not the idea itself, but the subterfuge the experiment is already masked in. Privatizing the safety of Earth and leaving the planet beholden to a company that clearly looks out more for its own interests than any greater good.

But he remembers that long-ago evening, the hostage crisis, Souther and Nguyen and Chrisjen’s ruby earrings and her smirk. Perhaps the protomolecule could be his victory dropped into a pool of startled silence, and he could find Chrisjen’s eyes across the room and complete the circle. There would be a satisfying symmetry to it, the student outplaying the mentor, two old friends on even ground, finally a solution to the problem of lasting peace, and maybe then—

He does not let himself think about _maybe_. He types out a reply, unaddressed and unsigned, and hits _send_.

-

He’d thought Chrisjen would understand. Or—no, he’d known from the start that she would look at him the way she does when he confesses to Project Caliban, Eros, covering up Frank Degraaf’s murder, but also to _peace_ at the heart of it all. He’d hoped she might recognize that what drives him is the same as what drives her. He’d thought that she might at least forgive him if he came to her repentant.

A disastrously short amount of time later, he finds himself staring down the line he crossed, Jules-Pierre Mao on one side and Chrisjen on the other, and none of it is enough to save her.

**Author's Note:**

> Brought to you by that scene in 2x12 before the Eros hearings where Errinwright puts his medal in Chrisjen's hands, strokes the back of her hand with his thumb, and looks briefly at her mouth, and me going "wow what if he spent years being just hopelessly, irretrievably in love with her and they kind of both knew it but never ever talked about it, would that be agonizing or what."
> 
> Title is from the Oscar Wilde poem "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."


End file.
